Two Brothers and a Feeling
There's a specific quality to Overmono's music that I find very difficult to name without resorting to adjectives that feel inadequate — warm, organic, euphoric, melancholic — all of which are true and none of which captures what actually happens when you're inside one of their productions. Tom and Ed Russell have been making music together for years, individually as Truss and Tessela and collectively since around 2016, and the accumulation of that time is audible in Good Lies. This is music that knows what it is.
Good Lies came out on XL Recordings in spring 2023 and represents something like the moment when a project that had been building underground recognition steps into a larger space. It's not a sellout in any sense — the music is not compromised, not made more accessible at the cost of its essential strangeness — but it has a confidence and finish that suggests full artistic arrival rather than promise.
The record draws from the entire history of UK electronic music and synthesizes it into something that sounds simultaneously like now and like a distillation of forty years of craft. There are references to rave, to jungle, to garage, to the specific regional electronic traditions of Wales and the North of England — but the references serve the music rather than defining it. Everything has been processed through their particular sensibility and come out the other side as Overmono.
Why UK Electronic Music Right Now
I've been paying attention to UK electronic music for a long time and there's something happening right now that feels significant — a convergence of several strands of the tradition into a moment of unusual productivity. The pandemic years produced a lot of introspective music from a community that is fundamentally about collective experience, and the re-emergence of that community — of the club, of the festival, of shared physical space — has generated a charge in the music.
Overmono are part of this moment but they're also slightly outside of it. Their music works on a dance floor and it works in your kitchen at seven in the morning and it works at high volume driving and it works in headphones on a train. That kind of range — the ability to function across contexts without losing coherence — is rare and suggests something about the quality of the musical thinking.
'Walk Thru Water' is the track. It has a synth line that arrives about two minutes in and doesn't do anything complicated — just holds a note and releases it and holds another — and every time I hear it something happens in my chest that I'm not going to try to describe. Music that does this is the reason for music.
The Algorithm and the Feeling
I think about how Overmono's music circulates — through DJ sets, through late-night streaming sessions, through word of mouth among people who pay serious attention to electronic music. It's not music that benefits obviously from the recommendation algorithm because it doesn't fit cleanly into existing genre categories. But it spreads anyway, because the people who find it are the kind of people who want other people to find it.
That's a different kind of distribution, one that predates streaming and will probably outlast whatever comes next. The music is good enough that people will do the work of telling each other about it.
The quiet takeover is underway. I don't think anyone is going to stop it.
I've been playing Good Lies in enough different contexts by now that I understand it as weather-proof — it works in summer and winter, at volume and quiet, in a car and in headphones and through a good sound system. Music that works across contexts usually achieves it by smoothing away the edges, by making something that offends no specific situation. Overmono's record isn't smooth. It has edges. It just has the right edges in the right places.
The quiet takeover continues. The audience keeps growing. The music stays exactly what it is.
